DOCUMENTARY: The Making Of Humanity, 2023's Best Puzzle Game

Earlier this year, we spent time with tha ltd. and Enhance Experience, the creative teams behind Humanity, for a documentary on the game’s development.

While, on its surface, Humanity is a puzzle game about leading groups of people to a goal, as its name implies, its story wrestles with ideas of what it means to be human, the nature of groups, and why we always seem to resort to violence. Humanity’s story reflects real-world events, showing us the paths we’re currently on.

Watch The Documentary:

“Soon after we began making Humanity, a number of big events and movements broke out around the world,” Enhance founder and CEO Tetsuya Mizuguchi tells us. “There were human rights movements, the Hong Kong protests, [and] then there was the pandemic. And war soon followed in Ukraine. We had no idea how quickly and deeply AI would infiltrate our society either. I think all these things found their way into the core of Humanity. That question, for example, ‘What is humanity? What is human nature?’ We would often talk about how people, looked at individually, are good. There are so many wonderful people out there. But when they become a group, or a nation, or even just big groups, at that level, something happens. It’s like a different switch gets flipped. And what you see there, that is what we’re trying to depict in Humanity.”

Watch above or over on Game Informer’s YouTube channel to see the full documentary about the making of Humanity. “Violence Is Inevitable” speaks to the core creative team, including Mizuguchi and tha creative director Yugo Nakamura, about the project’s origins, its complications and lengthy development cycle, and how it came to show us the nature of humanity.